The blurb sounded really good. However all went down hill and turned into nonsense. It was becoming a chore to read it. I thought it was going to tackle the issues in a different manner, nore for a grown audience. Unfortunately this book wasn't for me.

Thanks to Pan MacMillan and Netgalley for the ARC.

The book centres around the life of Ingrid, a young Asian-American woman living in America. The story follows her as she navigates life, family, friends, relationships, and her PhD.

It’s an enjoyable read. It’s funny at times, and sad in others; particularly when Ingrid recounts her experiences of racism, difficulties with her self esteem, identity, body image, and relationships. There are some decent plot twists. It takes a particularly interesting and critical look at race and society.

Part literary mystery, part satirical take on the American campus novel, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut’s a blistering exploration of what it means to be an Asian American woman in contemporary American society, represented through her central character Ingrid Yang. Ingrid Yang’s a variation on the classic “innocent abroad”, born to Taiwanese parents she’s spent most of her life attempting to pass as white, she only dates white men, and she avoids the company of the more politically-vocal Asian American student body. Through happenstance, and the blatant manipulations of her almost-exclusively white tutors, she’s ended up in the Asian American Studies Department in Barnes University. Now in her eighth year of post-grad study, she’s stalled on her thesis. Her subject’s the work of Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou, aka the “Chinese Robert Frost”. Xiao-Wen Chou has become a canonical figure, the voice of Chinese American experience: extracts from his poems feature on posters and the kind of inspirational images routinely found framed in restaurants and dentists’ waiting rooms. He’s been so exhaustively researched Ingrid’s struggling to find anything to add to this vast body of existing material. Then a chance discovery sets her, and close friend Eunice, on a quest to uncover a mystery that will change everything, reaching into every corner of Ingrid’s existence.

What starts out fairly conventionally shifts gears into full-on satire after a major plot twist – one that will lead to scenes of absurdist proportions. What Ingrid uncovers takes her deep into a web of literary fraud and academic conspiracy. But, more importantly, it also forces her to confront the issues she’s been dodging: from racial stereotyping to tokenism and quota filling. Chou’s narrative’s a wonderfully wry, incisive take on the intricacies of racism towards Asian Americans from cultural appropriation to full-on violence. Chou also constructs a deeply-convincing, well-researched, portrait of the devastating impact of white male fetishization of East Asian women throughout recent history, a theme which harks back to her searing, viral essay “What White Men Say in Our Absence”, and here goes hand in hand with exposing the hypocrisy that can lurk behind a veneer of support from white people. I found Chou’s work accessible and fluid, deceptively so at times, the territory she covers, and the questions she raises, are important and timely. There are, admittedly, moments when her narrative threatens to go off the rails but even then, I still found it lucid and compelling.

Whilst the plot and the social commentary were to my liking, the characters and the writing style definitely fell short; "Disorientation" is, however, one of the most accurate depictions of academia.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou is a novel set in the world of academia, dealing with themes of race and identity.

I really enjoyed this book and the whole way through I found it very easy to see why the book was titled disorientation. It is very well written with a compelling storyline, witty narrative and well developed characters some of whom are more likeable than others. I really liked it.

Disorientation is a satirical campus novel that explores the academic world of authenticity, race, and power, as a student uncovers a secret about a canonical poet. Ingrid Yang is close to the end of her PhD on the Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou, but she's finding it hard to be inspired to write anything, especially as she doesn't really care about her topic. A discovery in the poet's archive leads her down the path of a mystery that might give her something interesting to write about, but it goes deeper than that, and Ingrid is forced, with the help of her best friend Eunice, to confront herself, her white boyfriend, and people across campus, as the place becomes a battleground for Ingrid's discovery.

This is a classic biting campus novel that takes a fresh perspective, looking not only at who gets to call authenticity in literature and academia, but at one woman's grappling with her own relationship to her identity and relationships to others. Ingrid is thrown from her safe existence with her mundane boyfriend to a life filled with harder morality and questions, and the book takes the reader through her journey in a satisfying way, with more of a character-focus than some satirical books can have. A lot of big topics are covered, most notably race, tokenism, and fetishisation of cultures, but also ideas of what free speech in universities means and even kinds of radicalisation, in both alt-right and incel communities. The conceit of the book might be satirical, but a lot of what is shows is very real.

I found this a funny and sharp novel, written in an engaging way, that shows the complexity and, yes, the disorientating experience of a character learning more about white institutions and what they uphold and protect, whilst she also tries to navigate what this means for her own work and love life.